Critically Examine Everything? How Deconverts Don’t Really Change

Critically Examine Everything? How Deconverts Don’t Really Change

More often than not I’ve seen a recurring narrative among the deconverted regarding a severe lack of critical examination. Should we strive to avoid testing our faith, or would doing so make it all the more secure?

Countless articles and books detailing testimonies of de-conversion have surfaced since the publication of Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Despite expecting a diverse array of stories and personal journeys, many of these testimonies are often so similar to one another you could hardly tell a book by John Loftus or Dan Barker apart if not for their names on the covers. Tekton TV made note of the recurring arguments and complaints in his hilarious parody of a cooking show.

Read any number of published biographies and it becomes clear that the people who wrote them never once tested their faith. They either clung to doubt that developed slowly over time or else dived head first at the first claim of a Biblical contradiction. Both parties are guilty of avoiding any serious critical examination in their early stages, but a good amount of guilt is to be shouldered by the fundamentalists they were surrounded by.

Critical examination is quite taboo in mainstream Christian circles. We’re taught not to question the pastor or anything the Bible tells us. Any issues we find are to be swept under the rug of faith, never to be brought out into the light for fear of unbelief. We’re told that doubt was a sin before we even had a chance to look for an answer. It’s little wonder then that we see these deconversion stories place so much blame on Christians. Yet that’s only half the problem. Non-believers who deconvert don’t truly de-convert. Time and time again they see things the same way a fundamentalist Christian sees them. Prayer? It was a magic request to get anything we desired. Hermeneutics? Everything was the literal Word of God meant for you personally. This is why they’re known as fundy atheists in apologetic circles. The only change we see is an outrage.

Is it right to taboo critical thinking towards Christianity? As we’ll see, it’s absolutely not. There’s a vast amount of Biblical evidence to suggest that honest questions and doubts are to be celebrated. It has been noted many times over that Biblical faith is the act of trusting in something we already know to be true, so doubt, in the sense of something sinful, would be denying or turning away from what we know to be true. It’s what the critics ironically call “faith,” choosing to believe something despite the evidence.

So what of honest questions? Let’s take a look at some Biblical evidence where God honours such doubts.

Genesis 15 finds Abraham asking, “….how will I KNOW that this future will happen?” God responds by making a legal covenant, a lawful promise that God cannot break. We see no rebuke here.

“When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.”

The Lord made clear that prophecies were to be evidence-based. If a prophet ever got something wrong he was not to be seen as a prophet of God.

In Joshua three, we see Joshua setting up miraculous criteria in advance for assuring that God was among the Israelites as they carried the Ark of the Covenant. Again, we see an evidence-based response to doubt.

When John the Baptist sends his disciples to determine if Jesus really was the messiah, Jesus responded by pointing to the miracles He had performed in messianic context i.e. by pointing to His recreation of OT events. John never got a rebuke.

There are many other examples of evidence-based tests and answers throughout the Bible. We simply have no ground to refuse or shrug off honest skepticism. There are doubts we’ve all struggled with. It would be dishonest of me to say I’m no longer wrestling with doubts or questions.

Turning back to our examination of atheist biographies, it’s clear this avoidance of critical thinking is lacking here too. How can I say that when their entire movement is said to be founded on logic and reason? For the sole reason that we never see the struggle. There’s a good amount of truth to their claim of a lack of belief definition of atheism. Why wrestle with doubt if we can sweep it under the rug and treat it as taboo? If an atheist doubts his stance after reading an answer either a scholar or apologist has given, shame on him. He isn’t meant to be questioning his atheism, he’s meant to be questioning the religious. Atheism is not something that can be questioned or critically examined. At least, that’s what we’ve been told. There’s not the slightest difference between claiming the lack of belief and hiding from challenges under the guise of “faith.”

The bottom line is everyone struggles with some kind of doubt. To deny that is to deny thought itself. Claiming the lack of belief is nothing but an easy way to keep doubt from the spotlight. We see the entire fruit basket of fundamentalism carried over to these biographies and deconversion narratives. All this is to highlight the importance of sound teaching within the church. There are good answers out there that easily satisfy our intellectual need, and even if there are some we haven’t found yet, that’s ok. I don’t have the answer to everything and I doubt I ever will. But I’m doing my best, and I should be ashamed if I’m doing anything less. To the question below, we should all strive to make the answer a confident “Yes!”

“….when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy